I just wanted to revisit this one in case anyone was googling.

I tried wiping the drives and installing W10 straight away but couldn’t get it to activate.

Installed W7 from the HP laptop media, didn’t even go online and upgraded immediately to W10 (using the ‘keep nothing’ option) and W10 activated once online. Kinda wierd but I think there was something on the HP W7 media that installed a digital key that was used for the W10 activation.

Anyway – I ended up donating 8 laptops to my son’s current school and 2 to his previous school.

I gave up managing our IT systems at work last summer we had w7 pro and had no end of blue screen of death issues. We now use an external provider.
This was 10 laptops and a nas drive. They migrated us from w7pro to w10 pro, upgraded two laptops, migrated the nas to the cloud, though the nas is still a back up.
All the problems went away, like NADA, nothing, not a peep.
So either I am a crap IT admin, or win10pro is awesome, possibly both..
(I can’t be that bad as my home laptop is W10 pro which I sorted recently after some advice on here from ex admin/notquitelettingitgo Cougar. )

I tried wiping the drives and installing W10 straight away but couldn’t get it to activate.

Installed W7 from the HP laptop media, didn’t even go online and upgraded immediately to W10 (using the ‘keep nothing’ option) and W10 activated once online.

The free upgrade to Win10 is officially finished, even though MS haven’t disabled it. My guess is that your organization has an enterprise licence and that blocked the Win10 upgrade. Reverting back to the OEM version wiped that licence and allowed the Win10 upgrade to activate.

^^ probably exactly the case.

To upgrade from W7 to W10 you need a licence key. If you have W7 Home or Pro installed and you do an upgrade it’ll automagically convert it to the same flavour as per the OP’s experience. If it’s running an Enterprise licence that likely won’t convert, you’d need a Home or Pro key.

The other way around this would be if there’s an OEM licence sticker on the machines, which there likely is, you could just enter that key manually into W10 when prompted.

The answer to this debate is really “it depends”. A Windows 7 machine with unfettered Internet access is a ticking time bomb. No ifs, no buts, it’s a question of when rather than if.

To be fair so is a W10 machine. Java Script is the biggest vector out there for hijacking a PC and any browser which runs it is just waiting to be exploited. If someone wants in, there are plenty of zero day cracks for a W10 PC which are just one phishing email away.

Java Script is the biggest vector out there for hijacking a PC and any browser which runs it is just waiting to be exploited. If someone wants in, there are plenty of zero day cracks for a W10 PC which are just one phishing email away.

You’re talking random technobabble nonsense.

You’re talking random technobabble nonsense.

Possibly.

But the standard format of the zero day hackathons is you get presented with a fully patched OS and Browser and are allowed one URL, from which you have to gain privaledged access to the OS. Every browser fails every time from the ones I’ve read about.

I am guessing they use JS to escape the sand box the browser is supposed to be running in (I’d be very surprised if they achieve it using only html).

OP, nice job. And some very nice and helpful advice in this thread. As well as some hilarious stuff.

<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>lowering the tone. on the Win7->Win10 step you found necessary, are you sure you were using the right mains cable? I understand from the speaker cable thread that long crystal OFC conductors cosseted in the right insulators could smooth the flow of electrons. Could this potentially ease the upgrade to Win10? Plus if you used Ethernet with the right cable you could optimise the digital flow. Or something. </span>

If the exploit requires a phishing email, then the major weakness is the human being who falls for the con. No OS is secure against that.

Win7 is no longer supported with security updates AFAIK. Win10 is. That alone makes Win10 much more secure.